In a comment to William Saletan's column about competitive eating for Slate, Conan776 compares the IFOCE contract to the World Poker Tour release forms. Several poker pros sued the World Poker Tour over the release forms, which resulted in an out of court settlement and a change in the release forms for all entrants.

July 8, 2010 at 11:03 pm by ojrifkin · More posts about:Contracts | Permalink * Comments (4)

4 Comments »

  1. anonymous said

    July 9, 2010 @ 10:53 am

    I say sue the entire organization no damn good. Cant eat here cant eat there go screw yourself

  2. crystal ball said

    July 9, 2010 @ 11:49 am

    I can picture Rich Shea throwing a temper tamtrum clearing off his entire desk in rage saying something like the hell with this whole fuckin thing let them eat wherever the hell they want . I dont give a crap anymore . I am sick of it you hear me

  3. Anonymous said

    July 9, 2010 @ 2:01 pm

    I would say there is clearly some illegal elements to the eating contract, especially related to restrictions about endorsements and doing outside challenges/activities. . .however, there is no real money in CE compared to poker or other sports. Lawyers are expensive. So it is not economically viable to take IFOCE to task via the court system regarding their shenanigans. So the only real solution is civil disobedience – i.e. kobayashi not doing nathans and other eaters just not following the rules. They can make examples out of a few people, but can’t kick everyone out. They need eaters as much as eaters need them. Viva la revolution!

  4. Mark said

    July 9, 2010 @ 10:36 pm

    Maybe a good tactic would be to recruit a disgruntled minor IFOCE athlete to sue, and forget the lawyers and go pro se, copying chunks from the poker lawsuit filings and in general going DIY, using the internet and a local law library, and crowdsourcing the legal strategizing openly on the internet.

    It would be a mess, but it wouldn’t prejudice a future real lawsuit by Kobayashi, and it would be low risk (only filing fees and deposition transcription fees … hey, do that via Mechanical Turk transcribers for a few bucks!). It might bring the IFOCE to the bargaining table. They might be afraid that the guy could actually win, and they probably wouldn’t relish discovery and depositions managed by a nutcase.

    At the point when the IFOCE begins to bargain, a real lawyer representing Kobayashi could insert himself by separately requesting specific changes to the contract, with the hint that Kobayashi would be next in court.

RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URI

Leave a Comment

Log in | Register | Comments by users who have not logged in will be held for approval